Traits of Common Traffic Sources

Every traffic source is different, but here are a couple traits I think apply to certain kinds of traffic based on my experiences.

Search PPC – Probably the most stable paid traffic source due to new eyeballs consistently seeing your ads every day. Kind of like advertising with a billboard above the freeway. My longest campaign has been running untouched for over 1 year. Biggest problem is dealing with other PPC advertisers constantly coming in and bidding on your keywords.

Organic SEO – If you are ranking for 1 keyword, then it’s not very stable because it’s so easy to knock you out. But if you are ranking for thousands of keywords across hundreds of pages, then it is pretty stable in my experience. Organic sites are my favorite because they don’t require the day-to-day monitoring that paid traffic campaigns require.

PPV – The longest PPV campaign I had ran for about 4 or 5 months, but I have heard from friends that they have some campaigns that have lasted over a year. Overall PPV campaigns have to be the easiest to run.

Social – Facebook Ads probably has the highest rate of banner blindness. Instead of new eyeballs seeing your ads, the same demographic is seeing them over and over. You need to tweak your ads to keep them fresh if advertising to the same demographic. With that said, you can drive a shitload of volume with Facebook. You can easily do 10,000+ clicks/day if you have enough campaigns.

Media Buys – Unfortunately I do not have much personal experience with media buys (I’ve only done small direct-to-site buys) so I can’t comment just yet. Once I gain more experience I’ll write about it. But I’m guessing if the site gets most of its traffic from organic SEO, then it too would be pretty stable due to new eyeballs seeing your ads everyday. A forum on the other hand likely has the same group of users sucking up most of the impressions.